Left to die like an animal: In a photo that's horrified Britain, a dying woman crawls in agony on a hospital floor as nurses laugh and joke nearby. Here, her daughter tells a story of cold-blooded neglect that'll appal you

The utter, crushing humiliation was, perhaps, as hard to witness as her excruciating pain. Laura Lamberty took this devastating photo of her mother Margaret — the family matriarch, a stoic and uncomplaining woman — because she could barely believe the evidence of her own eyes.

Acute pain had reduced Margaret Lamberty to almost animalistic desperation. She was driven to abandon every vestige of personal pride and dignity in her anguished attempt to seek relief for it. Her hospital gown flaps open, exposing her back. Oblivious, she crouches on the floor of a hospital ward and weeps.

Mrs Lamberty, 45, who died just three days after this photograph was taken, was abandoned by the nursing staff charged with her care, like a piece of human flotsam. Their sole concern, as she writhed in agony, was that she was disturbing other patients.

Margaret Lamberty, pictured, was ni so much pain she was forced to curl up into a ball on the hospital floor

The 45-year-old grandmother was a patient in University Hospital of North Staffordshire when she died of organ failure

Margaret Lamberty, pictured, was admitted into the hospital suffering from crippling stomach pains

The grandmother, who had been admitted to the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, last month with agonising stomach pain, was desperate for pain relief.

Yet she was forced to prostrate herself — literally to crawl on her hands and knees like a stricken animal in her attempt to get help — before medics attended to her.

When her mother’s condition deteroriated some nine hours after she was taken to hospital, Laura, 28, had tried to summon a nurse by pressing the buzzer at her mother’s bedside.

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And when nobody arrived after the alarm had bleeped continuously for 30 minutes, Laura went to the nurses’ station. ‘The nurses were laughing, joking, drinking tea,’ she says. ‘Some of them were clustered round a computer.

Laura Lamberty took the distressing pictures of her mother as evidence of what happened to Margaret Lamberty at North Staffs Hospital

‘One nurse was just standing there, so I asked politely if she could bring some pain relief for my mum.

‘She said: “You’ll have to take your turn because there are other patients waiting for help.” I assumed she must mean that there were people who were dying, but I couldn’t see anyone who seemed as ill as my mum.

‘Mum hated making a fuss, but when I told her she’d have to wait, she said: “But I need help now.”

‘It was then that she dragged herself to the end of the bed and tried to get off. Then she fell heavily to the floor. It was horrible to watch. I tried to lift her, to help her, but she was a dead weight. Then she started to crawl along the corridor towards the nurses’ station.

‘I tried to hold her up, to get her back in bed. She was crying with pain and I felt desperate. ‘Her hospital gown was gaping open at the back. Normally Mum would have been so embarrassed, but she was in such agony she was oblivious.

‘A nurse walked by as I was trying to help Mum up. She asked what Mum was doing, but didn’t pause to help. Another male nurse came over and I asked if she could have morphine.

‘He said: “You need to get her back into the ward. You’re disturbing everyone.” The nurse didn’t help her up, but made an attempt to usher her back, still crawling, into her room. She was left there, on the floor, while they gave her morphine through a cannula in her hand.’

Laura adds: ‘She was just lying there, curled up on the floor and I was in shock, wondering what on earth was happening. No one seemed to be listening to me.

‘It was then that I took the photo. I thought: “I have to have evidence of this. It’s unbelievable.” ’

Laura is unsure how much time had elapsed — perhaps it was an hour; her memory is blurred by shock and grief — before her mother’s partner Paul arrived at around 7pm. Between them, they struggled to haul Marg-aret from the floor and onto the bed.

Before Laura left the hospital at 8pm that evening — Sunday, April 27 — to return to her home in the nearby Stoke-on-Trent suburb of Chell, she sought reassurance that this lapse in care was an aberration.

She expected her faith in the hospital to be restored. Above all, she wanted to know that her mother would be accorded respect, dignity and proper medical attention.

‘I told myself that, despite everything, Mum was in the safest possible place,’ she says. ‘When I left, I was assured that a consultant would be seeing her later that evening to assess her, and that they’d ring me if her condition worsened.’

But nobody rang Laura that night, despite Margaret deteriorating catastrophically. She died in intensive care of a blood clot on the bowel and multiple organ failure, at 10pm on Wednesday April 30.

Margaret Lamberty pictured with her brother Patrick

Margaret Lamberty’s family — four children and eight grandchildren — are now left without the hub around which their lives revolved.

Aside from their grief, Laura and her younger siblings Sarah, 27, Tony, 19, and 14-year-old Gemma, are also bearing a burden of regret and anger, because they believe their mother would still be alive had her illness been treated promptly. They are planning to sue the hospital for failing to diagnose her condition until it was too late to save her.

Mrs Lamberty had a history of blood clots — a fact recorded in her medical notes, and which Laura reiterated repeatedly to both paramedics and hospital staff — and had undergone successful operations for deep vein thromboses in her legs in 2011.

And the fact that she survived this surgery sharpened her zest for life. She strove, says Laura, to store up happy memories for her family, and lived frugally so she could treat them to days out at theme parks and seaside resorts.

‘Mum’s family was her life. She asked for nothing for herself,’ says Laura, full-time mum to five children — Joshua, 12, Jade, ten, Junior, eight, Jasmine, seven, and ten-month-old Jayden.

Indeed, Margaret was looking after Laura’s two eldest children, who’d been staying overnight with her, when she first became ill.

‘Joshua rang me at 7.30am on Sunday morning and said: “Nanny’s really poorly,” ’ Laura recalls. ‘So I said: “Make her a nice cup of tea and I’ll be over.” But Joshua said she was really bad, too bad to want to eat.

‘Alarm bells started to ring. I went straight over and found her curled up on the bathroom floor. She was sweltering hot and moaning in pain. We called 999.’

A paramedic arrived within minutes. He took Mrs Lamberty’s blood pressure, gave her intravenous pain relief and stayed with her for 45 minutes until an ambulance arrived at around 9am.

Laura was asked about her mother’s medical history. She mentioned her arterial disease and the operation to remove blood clots. Notes were taken. Laura watched her mother wince with pain that Sunday morning as spasms shot through her stomach.

‘Her belly was swollen and it seemed to contract with the pain,’ she remembers.

Margaret, hooked to an oxygen mask, was taken straight to Stoke’s flagship University Hospital, three miles away. Laura — who had temporarily left her children in her brother Tony’s care — was at her side.

Laura Lamberty, holding a photograph of her late mother Margaret said she spent 30 minutes trying to summon a nurse on the emergency buzzer

Margaret Lamberty, holding her niece Katelyn Bond was told she 'would have to wait her turn' when she called for help with he pain

Staff at University Hospital of North Staffordshire, pictured, stood chatting and laughing just yards away from where Margaret Lamberty lay curled up with pain

She lost track of time at this point, but recalls arriving at A&E and repeating the details of her mother’s medical history for the third time that day to a triage nurse.

She accompanied Margaret to a cubicle where, curled up in the foetal position, she struggled to contain the waves of pain that assaulted her.

Medical staff came and went. Laura found herself parroting her mother’s symptoms, listing her ailments, again and again. Margaret was given morphine. For a while she seemed delirious.

‘She started talking nonsense, and the pain was still horrible. I don’t think the morphine helped,’ says Laura.

The day passed in a blur. Early in the afternoon, Mrs Lamberty was sent for an X-ray.

‘It seems that it revealed nothing, and because mum’s blood pressure was normal they didn’t seem unduly worried. But her white blood cell count was up, which they said could be due to an infection. I was concerned. Mum was crying out in pain.

‘Normally she’d be telling me to get home and look after the children. But it was as if everything had been wiped from her mind except the pain. All she wanted was help.’

At around 3.30pm that afternoon, Mrs Lamberty was sent to the clinical decision unit so doctors could assess her condition. It was there, as she writhed in uncontrollable pain, that Laura buzzed for a nurse who failed to arrive.

It was there, too, that Laura watched the dreadful, degrading spectacle of her mother writhing, doubled up with pain on the floor.

‘When I took the photo, after two nurses had left Mum there, I thought: “This is just unacceptable.” I was so shocked I wanted proof it had actually happened.’

That evening it fell to Margaret’s partner Paul and Laura to restore Margaret to her bed. Nurses were nowhere to be seen. She received the consultant’s resassurance that the family would be kept informed.

‘Despite everything, I had to put my trust in the medical staff, that they’d look after Mum,’ says Laura.

‘I had to get home to care for the children. And, obviously, visiting hours had ended by then.

‘Mum couldn’t talk with the pain. I wish I’d told her then that I loved her. Paul gave her a kiss. We both left with heavy hearts.

‘That night I slept restlessly, with my phone on my pillow in case the hospital rang.’

Laura said she was 'shocked' by the treatment her mother Margaret Lamberty, pictured, received from hospital staff

It was 7.20am on Monday when Laura took a call from the hospital. ‘The nurse in charge said Mum wanted to talk to me. She was begging me to take her home. She said she was in agony. By then I was in tears.

‘I didn’t know what to do. I phoned Mum’s best friend and my sister. “She’s in the best place. You can’t bring her home,” they told me. So as soon as the children were at school, I went in, with Paul and my youngest, Jayden, to see her.’

The sight that met her was distressing.

‘Mum lay in a bed splattered with blood stains. Her arms were yellow and blue with bruising. Her belly was swollen and her hospital gown was filthy. Her lovely long brown hair was tangled. A pile of clean sheets lay on the bedside chair, so I changed her bedding. I washed Mum and tied her hair back.

Jayden stood by her bed chanting, “Nan, Nan, Nan.” It was the first time he’d said “Nan” and normally she would have been so proud. But she was too ill even to acknowledge him.’

At lunchtime, Laura and Paul wheeled Margaret outside, into the fresh air. ‘Get me out of here,’ she managed to whisper, but Laura tried to soothe her.

At 2pm that day Laura left the hospital to collect her children from school, promising Margaret she’d return in a couple of hours. When she arrived back there was still no news. ‘The nurses said they still didn’t know what the matter was,’ she remembers. ‘They were still trying to find out.’

That night, back at her home, Laura carried out her own research on the internet. She decided the pain in her mother’s abdomen might indicate a problem with her large bowel.

‘I wondered if the doctors should carry out an endoscopy, insert a camera to see what was going on,’ she says.

The next day — on Tuesday, some 48 hours after she’d been admitted — Laura returned to the hospital and expressed a wish that her mum be given an endoscopy. It was 2pm before it was done.

Laura waited for news and by 4pm the prognosis was dire. ‘Her condition had worsened. It was critical,’ says Laura.

‘I just burst out crying. I couldn’t believe it. I felt anger and regret. After that, Mum never regained consciousness and I hadn’t been able to say goodbye.

‘All the staff could say was how sorry they were. They said they had planned to do a CT scan next day, but it was too little, too late.’ That night family and friends rallied. Laura dozed fitfully in the waiting room outside the critical care unit where Margaret was on a life-support machine.

‘At 11pm, I was allowed to go in and see Mum,’ she recalls. ‘She did not look like herself. Her face was swollen and yellow with jaundice. She was heavily sedated.

‘But despite everything I tried to stay positive. I felt awful but I just didn’t want to accept that she’d die.’

Hospital Chief Executive Mark Hackett said they were investigating Mrs Lamberty's death

Margaret clung to life for almost 12 hours. The next day, at midday, belatedly she underwent the CT scan which — had it been done when she was first admitted to hospital three days earlier — Laura believes could have saved her life.

‘The surgeon told me the scan revealed a blood clot on the large bowel,’ says Laura. ‘He said Mum would be going straight to theatre so they could operate on it.’

At 7.30pm, after the operation, Laura confronted the bleak fact that her mother was perilously close to death. The surgeon told her that her mother’s bowel was damaged beyond repair and she had suffered multiple organ failure.

‘The critical care team was brilliant,’ says Laura, ‘but by the time Mum got to them it was too late.‘I watched the monitors, heard the machines beep as her heart beat for the last time, and then I screamed.

‘Since she died, I’ve found letters at home she wrote for us after her first operation in 2011, when she was very ill. She said whatever happened to her we should feel no guilt, no regret.

‘But of course I do. Could I have done more to help her? I can’t help thinking that if only Mum had been the type to make a fuss she wouldn’t have been left to die in agony like an animal.’

Mark Hackett, the hospital’s chief executive, said: ‘We have heard what the family of Mrs Lamberty has told us and we very much sympathise with them on her sad death.

‘However, the situation is not as clear cut as it seems since Mrs Lamberty was very ill with a number of serious conditions when she came into hospital and our clinicians sought to deal with those.

‘The Trust is still investigating and we will be in contact with the family in the next week to share our findings.’

But this is not much consolation to a grief stricken Laura. ‘Without Mum I feel lost, empty. She was my strength,’ she says. ‘She held us all together. She would have fought for us all, but never for herself.

‘Now she has been taken from us and it is my turn to fight for justice for her.’